​ UTVA Leadership Team Updates2017-2018

I asked Sam for some credit deficient data this week, and it is now, in the front of my mind as to why we have a pretty hard climb ahead for high school.

I do, however, value and want anyone’s innovative, simplified, and focused ideas, plans, dialogue, and questions to move this data.We can flip this and be a school with 31% off track and 68% on track, instead of the opposite, like it shows here.

Testing until 95%. Jon has done an awesome job in monitoring. Let’s make sure that both schools are at least 97%--just in case there are errors in calculations. On the state’s side of course, because we know UTVA doesn’t make mistakes ;)

Admin Book Study for summer retreat: Pick one book that for your own professional development that you will read and report back to the team during our retreat. Let me know what book you select so we don’t select the same one.

AEF Presentations: During a week in June, for our CR consultations we will be presenting the AEF to CR team and are encouraged to bring our own school’s culture to the presentation. I’ll find out the exact date soon, but please be thinking of how you will want to present the info. And it goes without saying, but plan on your webcams being on J

Hiring: We need to start interviewing as soon as possible. Please let me know what I can help with. Everything is posted on teachers-teachers. The new contracts will start on Aug 1, but we can find funds to pay a stipend to have some training days in July for the new staff. I’d love to have computers, accounts, and K12 training all ready to go and finished by Aug 1 so they can hit the ground running.

So much going on this year, but please take everything in perspective. Even if you a drop a ball, it’s not the end of the world and tomorrow will come and our team will be there to help. Take a deep breath, walk outside and know that June 5th is a real date with much different priorities. We got this.

If we need to make further changes, I'll add the most recent date in the name

This is an important SAGE update on ELA scoring from USBE:

Assessment Directors,**Please be aware of the following items, all information is very important, please disseminate to your appropriate colleagues in your districts/schools.**

SAGE ELA Assessment

We appreciate your diligence and professionalism as we near the conclusion of the 2016-2017 Spring Summative Assessment window. Based upon reports from the field, we have been investigating potential scoring issues with the Language reporting category of the SAGE Summative ELA Assessment.

AIR has identified the cause of the issue and has corrected the problem. All impacted SAGE Summative ELA tests (n=330,000) are being rescored. This process began last weekend and will continue for the next couple of days. As the process is executed you may see an increase in the Language reporting category score and in overall ELA scores within ORS. We expect the rescore process to be completed later this week. Please wait to print of individual ISR reports until this process is complete. USBE will communicate to the field at the conclusion of the scoring.

SAGE Writing Assessment

As stated in a previous memo, there was a change in the way that writing responses were evaluated this spring compared to previous years. Due to timing of the changes, writing essays were re-scored using the previous 2016 rules if they were flagged the following issues, and received an internal condition code of:

“Prompt Copy Match” = Student response is highly matched (70% +) with text common to the passage or item prompt“Duplicate Text” = Student responses is substantially repeated text copied over and overThese essays should be rescored, and in some cases, were also sent for human scoring to validate the score. This process will also be complete this week.

Student essays could also be flagged for:

“No Response” the essay was blank and is considered not attempted and does not receive a score“Not Enough Data” = Student response is less than minimum number of words configured in the rubric (typically >12 words) These essays will not be rescored

Student essays could be sent for human scoring:

If the electronic scoring engine predicts that it does not have confidence in the score, or predicts a score that is in-between two levels, it will be routed for human scoring.

Up to 20% of all essays could be routed for human scoring and this will delay the reporting of a writing score and therefore an overall ELA score by several days.

Holly Davies is working hard to plan the NJHS ceremony and we found a speaker (YAY!)

We had a great PLC on Monday where we talked about how to finish strong and then started on some work looking forward to next year and getting some planning started.

I’m turning Friday’s PD over to them to create agenda’s with their teams and create their own work items and I’m excited to see how it goes!

There has been concerns expressed about the way we test and some very frustrated, deflated, discouraged teachers as SAGE scores roll in. Working to see how to combat that. I think we all need a lesson on how to read growth scores.

Teachers are wondering what programs they will have next year, what programs kids will have access to over the Summer so I’m going to get with Shelly this week and work on getting that information for them.

We’ve started on curriculum maps and I’m working to get all the kinks worked out of schedule issues this week. We’re creating student schedules to send to returning students at the end of this year so they have plenty of time to plan their schedule around their classes, or follow the provided schedule and not have to go to the work of creating their own.